Saturday, March 14, 2015

No-Crust Buttermilk Pie

This pie is SO easy and so delicious. It's a little bit like custard, but not as egg-y and a little more buttery. And because it has no crust, you just mix the ingredients together, pour into a pie pan, and bake. It only takes about 5 minutes of prep. No fuss, no stress. Just homemade goodness.





4 eggs, beaten
1-1/3 cups buttermilk (milk + vinegar)
1-1/2 cups sugar
2/3 cup baking mix (e.g. Bisquick)
7 tablespoons butter, melted
1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Put 1 tablespoon white vinegar in a 2-cup measuring cup and add plain milk until it reaches the 1-1/3 cup line. Then let it sit for 5 minutes. That's a quick and easy way to sour milk to make "buttermilk." You can use real buttermilk, but I think it tastes better this way.

Mix all the ingredients together until smooth. What I do is put the eggs in a bowl and beat them, then add everything else and whisk it good. I don't even need a mixer.

Pour the mixture into a 9-inch greased pie plate. Bake at 350 for 50-60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. The top should also be golden brown.

That's it. It's so easy. Now all you have to do is enjoy it.




Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Women’s Rights, Gay Rights, and the Problem of Liberal Rhetoric

Many people don't notice this, but liberals always speak of people by the group they belong to - African Americans, gays, whites, Hispanics, women, poor people, etc. They talk about the rights of people as a function of belonging to a group - gay rights, women's rights, etc. They don't speak of people as just people in general. The liberals are not color blind. Far from it. They are keenly aware of race and gender and other group statuses because they are the ones promoting separate factions and pitting groups against each other for their own ends. If you don't believe me, just listen to them sometime. They can hardly talk about anything without making it all about special groups. And in the irony of ironies, they have somehow managed to convince a lot of people that it's the conservatives who are racist and sexist.

Liberals don't really care about gays or women or children or poor people. They just want votes and to be thought inclusive and tolerant. It's all part of their image. But they don't actually want to help anyone or stop hatred. In fact, they're very good at promoting hatred (especially against Christianity and conservatism) and drumming it up where it doesn't exist. They survive on the hatred and misunderstanding between groups. They want the country splintered into different groups that all have grudges against each other. That way, they can pretend to commiserate with all the separate groups and promise them help in exchange for votes and money. They need people to be riled up and upset so that they can swoop down with their promises of change and trade people a "government solution" in exchange for their freedom.

How do we know liberals don’t really want to help? Because they don’t actually help. Liberal policies don’t produce good results. They don’t cure poverty or stop racism or protect rights. Their policies are carefully crafted to look good on the surface, but not stop the evils of society, because it is the existence of those evils that keeps everyone coming back to liberals for “solutions.” To cover this failure of their policies, liberals are very good at turning the conversation away from the actual results of their policies and talking instead about all their good motives.

On the other hand, the conservative emphasis on freedom and personal responsibility and equal rights for all does help reduce poverty and racism and treats people as equals, but without taking freedom or money away from one group to give it to another. Conservatives don’t have to whine and pander to special interest groups and tell them all how terrible they have it to get votes. So we have no interest in keeping people down or making them hate one another. We want people prosperous and free, not dependent on us. A healthy, free, and productive society is better for everyone. A society of separate factions that hate each other is bad for everyone – except liberal politicians.

Conservatives, unlike liberals, see people as just people. We realize they belong to different groups, but conservatives see the humanity of other people first. We recognize our similarities as being more important than our differences. And so the idea of special gay rights or women's rights or minority rights are a foreign concept to us. All human beings have the same rights by virtue of being human. Rights don't come from group membership. There are no special rights that some groups have and others don't. We conservatives aren't for gay rights or women's rights or any other special rights based on group status, but not because we're against gays or women or blacks or any group (as liberals like to claim). We're against these special rights precisely because we see all people as being inherently equal. There are only human rights, and all humans have them.